By – Paul Cordes Wilm

There’s A Shadow Hanging Over Me

As long as I’ve been listening to music and in turn, as long as I’ve been making music (since I was a small kid), I’ve always been aware of and truly appreciated just how powerful of a tool it can be, especially when it comes to emotional purging or catharsis. I recall being around 5 years old listening to The Beatles’ song “Yesterday” over and over again because I was utterly amazed at the intense and binding spell it could put on me, summoning new tears with each listen. It perplexed my young mind that, with just the right balance of lyrics, chords and instrumentation, a listener could be drawn that deeply into the song’s longing, yearning and intense world of loss and regret. With that one song setting the stage for my lifelong love of music, I found eventually that nearly every great song written comes from a place of longing : a longing to express, a longing to be heard, a longing to find comfort in getting a particular feeling out, knowing that there are others who feel or have felt the exact same way and will appreciate it for everything it’s worth.

Until this particular album, I had enjoyed Noah Lennox (Panda Bear)’s music intensely. He has a knack for creating irresistible hooks that not only fill the listener with giddy joy, but also an astounding sense of vocal harmony and a wistful, playful way of rethinking and reimagining traditional song structures and repetition. Also, the way he approaches melody has always been an explorative and clever combination of Pop familiarity (a sort of displaced nostalgia : “That reminds of another song, but … what?!) paired with Lennox’s unmistakable and iconic approach to singing. What we get as a result of all this is music that’s completely and utterly original.

And then there are the lyrics.  Until I heard Sinister Grift, Noah Lennox’s lyrics were always kind of the “weak link” in the equation. Not that they were bad in any sense. They were just simply more abstract and vague, never direct; something to blow through those exquisite melodies and  immaculate harmonies like air in a balloon … Until now. This new album really caught me off guard word-wise. From the opening song “Praise” to the closer “Defense”, Panda Bear gets quite a lot off his chest. And it’s quite a rewarding experience to hear him sing about so many personal things.

Sinister Grift offers the listener a more “fleshed out” and very human take on Noah Lennox. Without spoiling the listen for you, I caught glimpses of break up woes, mortality fears, political concerns, the list goes on. And what’s refreshing is that although much of the subject matter might have a grim and sinister flare, both the melodies and harmonies remain true to Lennox’s canon : The giddy joy is definitely still there, and what’s more, in each song it seems to serve as an antidote; a kind of healing balm to ease the dark, heavy and often painful makeup of the lyrics.

With all this in mind, it only goes to strengthen the testimony I’ve held onto as a kid : That music truly is a magic all its own, and whether a musician chooses to fill it with mysterious, confusing lyrics, verbatim in-your-face lyrics or even no lyrics at all, it really is the best medicine in the world. And just for the record, to this very day, “Yesterday” still makes me cry.